Closing Time (5 page)

Ever afterward, 1959 was referred to as “the year we lost the house.” Losing the house signified not only defeat and humiliation but a rupture with a putatively arcadian past. Decades later, when I went back to visit Russell Street, I was startled to come upon a tiny, standard-issue two-story row house with a three-step front stoop, a vest-pocket garden in the back, and no garage, located in a grubby, charm-free district that had disintegrated into a slum just a few years after we left it. The way my parents always talked about this repository of shattered dreams, it was as if we had been evicted from Versailles or Eden itself.

My father, as usual, blamed Dwight D. Eisenhower for this catastrophe, insisting that if the bland, passionless Ike had spent less time lollygagging around the fairways and more time at the economy’s helm, misfortune would have eluded us. He reviled Ike with a virulence that very nearly surpassed human understanding, given that our thirty-fourth president, both then and now, struck most people as an affable fuddy-duddy, an amiable duffer, a harmless old coot. But perhaps I did not know all the particulars.

Our more prosperous aunts, uncles, and in-laws—most of them on my mother’s side of the family—laid the blame for our displacement into the public-housing wilderness directly at my father’s feet. Notwithstanding the fact that the nation had been hit hard by the 1958 recession, they believed that a more resourceful man would have figured out a way to shield his family from the disgrace of going on pubic assistance and being deported to a housing project. I have always believed that my father’s ruinous drinking and brutality toward his children dates from this event. But my mother insists that he was already hitting the hard stuff when she met him, that he was always a willful, irresponsible sort, and that losing the house was probably inevitable, given his flaccid moral character. These assertions may be true, and if so, they certainly call into question her decision to marry him. Still, I have no recollection of his being monstrously cruel to us before he lost his house. To the contrary, I have vivid memories of adoring him.

Eight years old at the time we pulled up stakes, I had no idea what a housing project was, nor what living in one symbolized. I knew that it meant changing schools and leaving my friends behind, and I suppose I had some hazy notion that our relocation was less than voluntary. My parents, especially my mother, were initially successful in convincing us that our present situation was little more than an inconvenience, and an evanescent one at that. The family was not dying; it was merely convalescing, so we should all just buck up. One of my mother’s most impressive traits was her ability to give reality an on-the-spot overhaul, dissembling here, fantasizing there, in the process making our misfortune seem not only tolerable but almost appetizing. She prided herself on having shrewdly managed to secure us lodgings in a new, reasonably safe housing project in northwestern Philadelphia and not in the dreaded Tasker or Wilson Park Homes all the way down in South Philadelphia, where, presumably, those children lucky enough to escape abduction by white slavers would be ripped to shreds by ravenous curs. Forty-seven years later, as we were motoring past one of the wretched, far-flung South Philly slime pits we had fortuitously sidestepped, she would reflect with tremendous pride on our narrow escape from the terrors that lay in store south of Market Street.

“No matter how bad things got,” she said, beaming, “at least we kept you kids out of South Philadelphia.”

And what was so horrible about South Philly? Italians lived there.

The East Falls Housing Project had originally been designated as living quarters for soldiers returning from the Second World War. Functional structures never intended to be permanent residences, they were meant to serve as inexpensive, temporary housing for cash-strapped war vets until they could get back on their feet. However, by the time we showed up, housing projects had already begun to assume a different function, serving as unofficial dumping grounds for luckless white trash, Negro fugitives from the Dixie diaspora, divorcees, alkies, lollapaloozas, con artists, bad actors, lunatics, perennial screwups, stage-door Johnnies, black sheep, abject failures, and women of easy virtue. Increasingly, the assumption was that when you moved to the project, you stayed there; it was society’s version of a called strike three. As far as your old friends were concerned, when you pitched camp in a housing project, you might as well have relocated to Quito or Mombasa or Dar es Salaam. You had been cast out into the darkness, and that was probably where you belonged.

Buffaloed by parental guile, my sisters and I were at first seduced by the cheesy glamour of public housing. It helped that our new living quarters did not reek of coal, as the house on Russell Street had. We even convinced ourselves that
our
project was superior to one about a mile away, because even though the Abbottsford Homes were in a nicer location and boasted a slightly classier clientele, the buildings themselves were dreary redbrick affairs with ugly green doors and microscopic windows. By contrast, the units in
our
housing project sported commodious plate-glass windows that filled the living room and second-story bedrooms with sunlight. Moreover,
our
housing project snaked its way up a hill, and right at its apex sat our house, at 4575 Merrick Road, just a few hundred yards from the mighty Schuylkill River, creating a fleeting illusion of grandeur.

The project was divided into two sections: a pair of looming fifteen-story apartment buildings planted on opposing hills, and roughly three hundred house-type objects. Our house was one of the many two-story, flat-roofed, three-bedroom structures, which were identical save for a colorful strip of cardboard inserted inside the rippled piece of transparent glass that gazed out from each living room. This was perhaps a design gambit to make the homes look perky, or at the very least less interchangeable. There were yellow strips and red strips and blue strips and green strips. There were no unusual colors; magenta and teal and chartreuse and ochre, if they even existed at the time, had not yet won the hearts of the American public. As far as I know, no one ever tried to remove the strips or replace them with some other color or pattern, though doing so would not have been very difficult. Everything about the units was maladroitly cute; for all intents and purposes, we were living in a Lego village. It was shiny and amusing and peppy and not at all demeaning—at least from the point of view of us children. But the cumulative effect on adults must have been to make them feel juvenile. They had lost their livelihoods; they had lost their homes; they had not behaved with the competence expected of adults; so now they must live in dollhouses.

The high-rises did not look juvenile; they looked foreboding and, in the fullness of time, as they steadily became more and more unsafe, bleak. They had been built in the mid-1950s, with four apartment units sharing a common elevator on each floor; four elevator banks served roughly sixty units apiece. Only later did the powers that be realize that this architectural scheme made policing the buildings impossible, because each elevator bank could easily be controlled by criminals. In due course, the high-rises became nesting grounds for drug dealers.

The apartment buildings were quite tall for their time and entirely out of character with the surrounding district, which consisted of block after block of two-story row homes. The high-rises had balconies on each floor, but after a number of mishaps, the authorities blanketed the façades of each building with industrial fencing. This could not help but reinforce the notion that residents were living in a penitentiary; the buildings looked like gigantic hamster cages. At the time they were built, the high-rises won several architectural awards, though I never found out from whom. Probably the Stasi.

Across the river, on a hill overlooking the Schuylkill, stood a set of luxurious edifices known as the Presidential Apartments. These were inhabited by prosperous people we never saw or met, as we had no reason to cross the river. Our twin high-rises quickly acquired the nickname the Vice Presidential Apartments, while the project as a whole was dubbed Sin City by better-fixed residents of the surrounding community. Apparently, this struck them as funny. Years later, I met a girl who had moved into the Vice Presidential Apartments three or four years after we put East Falls behind us. By then, the project was not only depressing but dangerous. Still, it was not as dangerous as the neighborhood Marguerite had grown up in; it was actually a step up. Once we spent an entire day in her apartment while her mother was at work. She was the first girl I ever loved, but that did not make this return trip any more nostalgic. It is natural to believe that love or hope or one of the other life-affirming emotions is capable of resanctifying a desecrated space, a place haunted by bad memories. But this did not happen here.

Many years later, the Clinton administration offered the City of Philadelphia a substantial chunk of money to rehabilitate the housing project. The city asked for dynamite instead. It blew up the apartments, razed the homes, and after many delays erected pert little town houses in their place. I visited the town houses one day and stood on the spot where our house had been and then on the approximate site of the high-rise where Marguerite and I had spent that memorable afternoon. I hoped that the residents of the cute little town houses would be happy there, that they would maintain their homes, that they would never take their good fortune for granted. Otherwise, a few years hence, it might be time for more dynamite.

 

East Falls—the entire neighborhood, and not just the housing project that bore that name—was an anomaly in that all the economic classes save for the spectacularly wealthy dwelt within its confines, though not contiguously. There were poor people, working-class people, middle-class people, and rich people all living within easy walking distance of one another. This was most unusual, since Philadelphia neighborhoods tended to be demographically monochromatic, demarcated along strict economic and racial lines. North Philadelphia, once teeming with poor Irish immigrants, was by the late 1950s teeming with poor black people. Lower-class white people lived in sullen neighborhoods called Kensington, Port Richmond, and Fishtown, which prided themselves on their ethnic purity and fealty to traditional values, as if that made their cheerless, claustrophobic streets any less grubby. Middle-class white people lived in the near-Northeast, middle-class Jews a bit farther north. Italians of all classes—including Angelo Bruno, head of the local Mafia—kept to themselves down in South Philly, minding their own business inside tiny, well-maintained row homes. Well-heeled Wasps who had not fled the city for the patrician Main Line lived in sprightly apartments ringing Rittenhouse Square. The few bohemian types Philadelphia could scare up pitched camp a few blocks south. The more generic Wasps lived in the city’s leafy northwest corner, in communities with plummy names like Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill. Truly rich people, by and large, did not live in Philadelphia.

The housing project itself abutted a working-class district consisting of small, unassuming houses undulating patiently up two adjacent streets: Calumet and Stanton. The residents of these streets never forgave the city fathers for sticking public housing right next to them, reasoning that people who did not own their own houses were not likely to maintain them and that poorly maintained houses were likely to attract an even worse class of poor people. The project, they complained, with intense passion but to no discernible effect, would eventually become a slum, thereby imperiling the nondescript but nonetheless flourishing community that adjoined it.

This is exactly what happened; this is what always came to pass back in that era, when central planning committees were forever concocting ingenious new schemes to make working-class people turn homicidal. Tellingly, as soon as we escaped from the project and moved into a middle-class community, we were pressured by our new friends into making the same fatuous statements about poor black people that were once made about us. Black people bred like rabbits and lived like pigs. Black people all drove Cadillacs. Black people all cashed multiple welfare checks. Black people spent the entire day devising cunning schemes to rip off the federal government. The proof of their astounding duplicity and ingenuity was that they got to live rent-free in glamorous locales like Cabrini-Green and Watts and North Philly and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Their perfidy knew no bounds. We knew, firsthand, that none of this was true, especially the part about the Cadillacs, but we acted as if it were. There was no point in graduating into the middle class unless you got to spit on the class you had just left behind.

A few blocks away from the meek community on Calumet and Stanton streets was a more prestigious neighborhood where the streets had enchanting names like Vaux and Ainslie and Indian Queen Lane. Indian Queen Lane was my favorite, the sort of street name that manages to be evocative without sounding synthetic, the kind of thing we never hear anymore. Indian Queen Lane—which also meandered diligently up a steep hill, another anomaly in the generally horizontal City of Brotherly Love—was home to a small theater company that was forever putting on corking amateur productions of plays like
You Can’t Take It with You
and
Charley’s Aunt.
The theater stood no more than a half mile from the project. But I never set foot in it, nor did anyone else in my family. It was a mite too genteel for the Queenan family.

A short pace up the road sat Warden Drive, a prosperous enclave whose tree-lined streets bristled with tasteful, well-appointed Tudorstyle homes. It was a refined, understatedly twee community where one sensed the engulfing presence of thatched roofs, even though they were not there. For many years, Arlen Specter, Philadelphia’s much-admired district attorney, a member of the Warren Commission (which investigated John F. Kennedy’s assassination and was thought by many to have muffed the assignment), and later a powerful, mildly independent-minded Republican senator, made his home there. A few times as an adult I ran into Specter on the Metroliner heading to Washington, and we reminisced about the old neighborhood. Though our recollections did not mesh seamlessly, I acted as if they did, adhering to that inexplicable stricture mandating that working-class people behave deferentially toward the rich and the powerful, not out of fear or respect or even envy but because no one wants to make a scene. This may also derive from a classwide belief that when the wealthy are making an honest effort to stay awake while you are speaking, the least you can do is be civil.